


Red Lights in the Horizon

by simplyprologue



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Western, F/M, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 02:05:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years on the run from the Lannister gang, outlaw Sandor Clegane drifts into a sad little town and discovers something to start living for. Four years after being abandoned by Geoffrey Lannister in a sad little town, Sansa Stark, now a madame and working girl in Peter Baelish's brothel, finds the man who can help her escape her cage. SanSan Wild West!AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. July 1869 I

**Author's Note:**

> Set years after this universe's Battle of Blackwater, Sansa Stark hires outlaw Sandor Clegane to help her out of her gilded cage and to San Francisco, where her father's former men are told to be working and where hopefully she can reclaim her family fortune and make a fresh start. Will eventually include other characters. Story will not be told in a linear fashion and will be updated whenever I feel so inclined. Each chapter will be titled with the approximate date of the chapter's events. 
> 
> Will include gun fights, salon brawls, shooting lessons, Arya as Annie Oakley, run-ins with the law, outlaws, and bandits, and a train robbery or two. Prompts are welcome. 
> 
> Starts in 1869--Sansa is 19, Sandor is 34.

He found the little bird in an upstairs room of a brothel in a tinderbox town that was lacquered with red dust and the shattered dreams of the tired, the weak, the alcohol-laden few who couldn't quite stretch their ambition enough to make it. There were feathers in her hair, hands folded demurely into the deep creases of her skirts. Sandor recognized the dress as one her had father bought for her, after he first struck gold back in '64.

Now it's stained, indecently hemmed, and spotted with liquor and the cut of the neckline too low—the little bird has grown quite a bit since old and dead Ned Stark had had the satin and lace gown made for his eldest daughter.

Sandor ties Diablo to a post outside the whorehouse, leaving the old black warhorse to kick or bite anyone who would try to steal him.

Sandor tosses the brothel owner—a mustached man who Sandor cannot quite place, whose smile is tarnished by a patina of slime—a purse of gold, and climbs the stairs to second floor, to the rooms where the girls are kept. He is thankful that the little bird has at least not been reduced to hang out the front door of the saloon in her petticoats to holler at drunks, or rather that the quality of this house does not lend to it, or require it of her.

He had only been intending to pass through the washed-out town (the gold long gone, most of the business with it, and only those who made enough to live comfortably or not at all remained) the night before… until he heard her singing, tipped his head towards the red light in the window, and saw her sitting at the window of her room, singing like the little bird she was.

Is?

Was.

Sandor thinks she might not chirp much these days. He had heard rumors, after he split from the Lannisters, that Geoffrey had abandoned Miss Stark in some dusty little town like this for the favor of Miss Margery Tyrell.

After sending his goons after her daddy, of course.

Maybe now she sings because the owner tells her to, to attract customers. After all, she must be a favored girl to have the front room.

He doesn't bother to knock on the door that he knows to be hers, just pushes his way through the door frame, and then lingers there, awkwardly, in the aftermath of his decision. He second guesses.

Maybe she chose this house; there isn't much by way of law in this wild Lannister west. A lady needs protection out here-a good brothel will protect a woman from a man who seeks to take what he wants without the permission granted by taste and coin. And he has certainly patroned these kinds of houses enough to not judge the girls who powder their faces and smile prettily for coin and safety and a full belly.

(After all, Sandor Clegane reminds himself, he's done worse for money. Much worse, if he remembers the bruises on Sansa Stark's face well enough.  _Enough_ , he remembers, and lets out a dry chuckle. Words, in the Lannister gang, weren't much, aren't much. And he is a man who has always prided himself on his… acts, as they are... and he didn't do a whit to save her.)

But God—heaven knows she could make a living sewing pretty dresses, or as some rich man's wife. It was a choice, he wants to believe. But there aren't many choices for a lady in a place like this; they wind up some man's property by one way or another. At least this way, Sandor hopes, she doesn't have to pretend to love the man who has bought her, and she doesn't have to warm his bed.

He can understand why she'd choose this, after Geoffrey.

Sansa looks up at him through her auburn waves with a smile not nearly as dainty as her gently-clasped hands.

"I sang to you, sir," she chirps from her seat at the window. "Was wondering if you had heard."

His mind swirls with dust and clouded memories. This isn't the little girl he left behind the night of the firefight, this is no pale and shaking thing.

No, Miss Sansa Stark is all fire and brimstone—red satin, red hair, redder lips, a wolfish smile full of promise and laughter.

"I'm no—"

"I know," she answers, almost teasingly. "It was said in jest." She pauses thoughtfully, standing; delicately brushes the creases from her dress with porcelain hands.

She makes the heat coil and churn inside her little room with a tight-lipped pause; Sandor shifts on his feet uncomfortably and lets her do so.

"I let the owner of this…  _establishment_  believe that he's keeping me here. Peter. He was a friend of my mother's, when she was a girl. Not entirely sure what happened since, but…"

"What?"

Sansa laughs again, endearingly. She moves from the window to her vanity, picks up a horsehair brush from a tarnished silver tray, and pulls it through her neat curls. "I've learned a few things, Sandor Clegane. And I reckon you've done the same, in the years since we last met."

Last met. Such a harmless way of putting that he had held a knife to her throat and made her sing.

"Yes…" And her damned sister had left him to die, before a Jesuit missionary found him. Where in hell is she going with this?

He tries to separate the brothel noise—the squeak of a mattress from the room over, the banging of a headboard against the wall, moans drifting through windows flung open in consideration of the sweltering heat—from Sansa goddamn Stark, sitting before him as alive and whole as he left her, sweat dotting her painted nose, smiling at him.

"One thing I've learned…" she pauses, not thoughtfully this time. Her eyes deaden in a way that makes him want to demand whether or not she is here by choice, but it's none of his damn business so he doesn't. "You owe me a debt, I believe. And I'm not sure if I'm ever gonna catch up with you again."

It's a fair bet, although Sandor doesn't want to think of how he might never leave, now that he knows that she's here. (He died with her on his lips, after all, with flames as red as her damned hair on his mind like hellfire.) He's a dog, and he's been without a master for far too long. And Sandor Clegane isn't the kind of man to sputter at the idea of serving a lady.

He'd worship at her altar if she'd let him; Sansa Stark was the only virgin he prayed to, getting clay and dust from the whitewashed floors on his knees. She was everywhere, back then—her fingers in the teasing summer winds, her imagined wrath in the violent storms, her cruelty in his shaking withdrawals. She was not a girl, but a goddess of nature. And here, she dares to sit a woman, a challenge to every fever-wracked illusion he reached out to touch with his damp and shaking fingertips. 

It almost makes Sandor hate himself more.

"What do you want from me?" he rasps, shutting the door behind him when she motions him closer, to sit on the bed.

"What do _you_ want from _me_?" she asks coyly in return. "You paid Peter the coin to come to me."

He balks, and she gives a tittering laugh.

"Like I said, I let him think he can keep me here. But he's taught me a little too much in my time, and his. I have the money to leave, Mr. Clegane, and the inclination to. I'm no little girl anymore, and I'm no kept woman, and I do not owe him any debts that he would imagine. But I have neither a horse or protection, and if I recall correctly, you could provide me with both. So, if you don't mind me mentioning—"

"My debt, as you're  _inclined_  to call it." He gives a dark laugh; an echo of when his alcohol glazed-evenings painted her in deep oils and inappropriate gazes. How could she feel safe with him?

_You came to her, you blasted fool._

"I could call it other things." Her tone is almost a threat, her smile the barest gleam of a dagger.

She has learned.

Sighing, she turns away from him, crossing her legs at her ankles under her voluminous skirts. The evening is deep hues of purples and reds, the heat of the sun barely diminished in its absence a reminder of their sins and all that they'll never escape, not really. Not that they really want to.

"So you want to leave, Miss Stark?"

She hums, before nodding. "I want to leave."

"And where do you want to go?"

Her lips tighten, her eyes looking steady out the window where the din of drunks and working women, poor men and their shouts, horses and the clucks of chickens rises from the street like heatwaves. "Home's gone." She swallows hard. He may have followed her into hell, but she deserves better than that. The little bird wants out of her cage, however painful it may be. She needs a plan. "San Francisco, maybe? It's a proper city now. And I still have my name. Some of my father's men wound up there, I've heard."

He nods; she watches him in the mirror, before looking down at her lap.

"We'll need to leave after business hours, but before Peter wakes up."

That almost answers his question of how she got there. That, and the  _not entirely sure what happened since_. He doubts the real answer is something simple, but again, he won't ask her. Even still, he'd as good as slit the man's throat while she readied what she needed.

"We can be long gone before that."

She nods again.

"We'll have to travel light little—Miss Stark."

She gives him a strange smile. "You can call me that, if you like."

"Call you what?" he bristles, uncomfortable. He didn't mean to call her…

"Little bird." Her finger-almost playfully, in a feminine way that she has always had-trace over the feathers in her hair, before her face darkens again. "Everyone here knows me as Elaine. Just so you're aware of it. Peter, he… but when I was your little bird, I was still Sansa. Besides," she says with a laugh, "it'd be nice to think there was something still innocent about me."

Innocent, perhaps not, Sandor thinks. Maybe only in his fever dreams. Geoffrey had peeled it off of her first, with his greedy, wormlike fingers. And now this Peter. But still, Sansa Stark is no fallen woman. Nothing pitiable, nothing graceless. She is not meant for this town of sadness and liquor-soaked delusions.

(No, he thinks. If nothing else, she was pushed, the red light hanging from her windowsill. But he does not think her fallen at all, just a glimmering jewel in a place she needs to leave. They need to remove themselves from this wild place, this tiresome game, and land barons who rule in place of the law, crown themselves kings over dismal little swallows of land. Then she can fly.)

"We'll be miles gone by dawn, little bird."

She smiles at that, but trembles.

_What makes you think you will be safe with me?_

He had promised her once, when he could not. He wants to laugh-the minister spoke of penance, and here the universe has spat him back at Sansa Stark's dainty feet. Penance, then. He can take a hint.

He keeps his promise.

By morning, the only red lights are the ones breaking over the horizon.


	2. July 1869 II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their first night on the run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Thanks to everyone who has shown interest in this story! I'm not sure how often I'll be updating (heavens knows I really, really, really, owe you all a new chapter of The Maiden in the Tower which I swear I'll get on soon) but hopefully because the chapters are short that there won't be too much space in between updates. Especially because the story isn't linear so I can just write whatever I want. Whenever I want. Very conducive to plot bunnies...
> 
> This chapter takes place the day after the first chapter. There's a lot of exposition, but I think it'll be useful to know going forward.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who commented!

"Why do you even trust me?" he asks her, his face carved into deep hollows by the campfire. The scars look even more gruesome by firelight. Sansa thinks she remembers that better than most other things about him. "I could have come and gone and not known you were there at all, little bird."

Sansa remembers a time when he strove to make her shake with fear. She hadn't understood it then, she an innocent thing of fourteen, but she does, now, with many miles and men between him and her. Peter did teach her more than just a thing or two, and she was a Madame in her own right. She can only hope that he has changed in every way but one. She can only hope that she still has hold over him.

She will not tell him that.

 _Because you were my only hope?_  Familiar faces are hard to come by. The men her father brought with him to the Dakota territory are either dead are long-gone, and the Lannisters have moved onto to richer veins, better gold. Those passing through Eerie bring word that the Lannisters have all the gold in Casterly Rock, an upstart mining town in Nevada, in their possession now. And her mother's family is as good as dead, as far as she knows. They're all dead. Her parents, her brothers, her sister. All dead, except her.

And somehow, Sandor Clegane.  _The Hound is dead._

And somehow Sandor Clegane, she had noticed his first night in Eerie, no longer drank.

She looks back at him, and he is waiting for an answer. And now that she has no one else to rely on, she must give him one.  _Because I made you break?_  But she doesn't want a broken man to be her savior, and Sandor Clegane seems wholer than when he left her, and she does not want to seem impertinent.

Instead, she laughs as if it is still all a game, and gives him an answer she knows he will accept. "You know how to survive, if you've made it these five years. I'll need that."

"Well, you won't be getting any  _gentle_  survival out here, little bird. There's no place to powder your nose on the run."

 _Are we on the run, then?_  Sansa knows that the Lannisters tried to have him run in on destruction of private property and arson, after he fled, and sent their own men after him for less legitimate reasons.

"I'll have no need to powder my nose out here, Mr. Clegane. Unless you're under the impression that I intend to market my wares to the tumbleweeds," she retorts loftily. Indeed, she has changed from red and lace gown into a plainer dress of pink cotton, fashioned her hair into a simple braid. "Weren't you under the impression that you were rescuing me from a life of sin?"

He looks up from the fire to look at her almost appreciatively, but it is Sansa who is appreciative that there is no wanting glint in his eye, nothing like how he looked at her while they lived in the Landing, when she was a girl who looked like a woman but knew nothing of the sort.

Sandor Clegane can now appreciate (Sansa does not think it is the right word, but she does not presume that he is still infatuated--with her or her innocence--after all these years) without desiring destruction.

Or perhaps it is because she is not some naive little girl on the cusp of womanhood that he no longer feels some perverse obligation to both shake the innocence from her and crawl inside her veins to inhabit her naivete, to reclaim her innocence for himself. Destruction, then, had always seemed imminent, been imminent. He had been such a man of loathing and loyalty and the battleground had always been his own body. Sansa had picked over his ghost, climbed through constructed iron bars and hollow walls of the Hound around the small child that he was, the stunted grotesque of boy whose face had never left the flames. And the little boy, who had reached out for the little girl that she had once been.

_Well, I am now a woman. What of him?_

"Girl, you were the one who went looking for me."

A teasing smile pulls taut across her face. "I never went anywhere. You saw me, I was in my room the entire time. You paid for a prostitute."

"Don't spout your bullshit at me, just like when you were back-"

"You trusted me as well, Mr. Clegane." She watches as he takes apart his revolver, cleaning it with a well-oiled cloth, worn cotton rubbing over tarnished filigree. She remembers this gun; she wonders if he still possesses the knife. She wonders what it would feel like to be the metal under his fingers, wonders if they would be any different from the other fingers she has felt on her body. She may no longer believe the Hound to be like one of the romance heroes of her stories, but that does not mean she no longer desires him. "What's to say that I won't be a burden?"

"I owe you a debt," he grumbles.

"You came looking for me without knowing that I had wanted you to."

"I owed you a debt before that. And besides, you sang knowing I'd come looking for you. Care to explain that one, then, little bird?" His face is close to a snarl, but Sansa decides to continue to tread a line close to impertinence. It is not too late to turn back and tell Peter she was kidnapped.

But she had spent many nights at her window thinking on Sandor Clegane, during the hours between the close of business and dawn.  _The Hound is dead_ , she had been told by Peter, when news of the outlaw's death had been told by one of the Moon Door's patrons. She had made sure that that man had chosen her as his girl for the night, had simpered and smiled for his ever-building tale of how he was present when the Hound fell to a band of ennobled outlaws, and shook the truth from his story later on.

She had picked apart the Hound's corpse like a vulture, circling over her memories and words of others, and his own, bare feet propped up on the windowsill, morning air drifting between her thighs as deep purple shadows stretched, catlike, along her skin.

Why had she spent so much time, thinking on a man who had held his knife to her throat? (Or rather, the man who saved her from the riot, or the man who wrapped her in his jacket when Geoffrey had her stripped in the town square.)

He was-- _is--_ not one of the pretty boys she favors, with skin like wispy clouds and hair like wet silk. No, he is cowhide and tanned leather, red scars, a snarling revenant who climbs in bed with her at night, scarred lips nipping at her dewy petals, calloused fingers at her breasts. She had wanted him drunkenly, lustfully, nothing like the practiced ladylike aloofness that made her a sparkling diamond in a town long run-out of gold.

The Hound is dead. As are her delusions, but not her wanting, even as he sits across the fire from her. Perhaps it was not then, when she learned of his supposed death, that she realized that she had dreamed up the kiss, but when she first realized that Peter would never take her to Aunt Liza or Cousin Robert, or when he first groped her breast and breathed Cat into the skin of her neck, bringing alive the dead woman who never loved him inside the shell of her daughter.

Peter had, of course, made sure to hollow Sansa out first, scoop her heart out and leave the rest for his monument to her mother.

She had taken clients to keep  _him_  from taking  _her_.

She owes Peter Baelish nothing--and now she can only hope that he did not recognize the Hound as the man who came into her room the night she left. He'll send men after them, she's sure--she's his ace in the hole.  _Was. Was his ace in the hole._

Sansa looks up at him, and shrugs. "You're the lesser of two evils, I suppose."

"Evil," he says with a self-indulging kind of chuckle, with a twisted grin. "Got that right."

"Well then," she counters, feeling anger flare in her breast. "If you believe yourself so evil, why did you come to me?" He says nothing, but laughs and shakes his head, still cleaning his gun. "And don't give me any of that debt... nonsense. If you were evil you wouldn't believe in that. Unless you intend to ransom me, but I don't have a darn clue to whom you think is left to pay you."

The grin dissipates just like the smoke curling up into the stars. "I'm not gonna be any good for you, Miss Stark. Can't promise you won't go hungry. Can't promise you won't die of thirst. Can't keep you clean. I can't even promise to keep you safe."

It is her turn to smile bitterly. "Mr. Clegane, does it look like any of the men who  _have_  promised to keep me safe have made good on their promises?"  _Yourself included_. He flinches, and she knows he remembers. He holds no petty ideas of grandeur or honor about himself. That will keep her safe enough.

The cloth stills on the gun. He could kill her, right now, with that very gun, and no one would find her body. The vultures would pluck out her eyes before dawn, carry off her hair for their nests. But she trusts he won't, and that's more than she can trust Peter. God forbid her usefulness had run out... but there is still her fortune to claim, the Stark money in the bank in San Francisco. Peter was only waiting on the government to declare her sister legally dead, so she could claim the money even still as Tyrone Lannister's wife.

She laughs, somewhat at him and somewhat at the bleak spectacle her life has become.

"A hound will die for you, but never lie to you. You told me that. Or were you too drunk for you to remember?" Sansa stands, and neatens her dress, her hair. "Either way, I'll take honesty over false promises and pretty words. I've learned that." He looks at her strangely, with that almost appreciative kind of look in his eye again. Sansa sighs, trying to shake the day--fleeing on horseback at dawn, the hours spent in silence with her arms wrapped around his waist. And she was never a good horseback rider, to begin with. Swallowing hard, she looks past him. "I think I'll sleep now."

She doesn't wait around for his answer. She doesn't think either of them are ready for any answers, yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reviews are very much appreciated, but thanks for reading!


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